Lothar Matthäus, the Original MLS Freeloader | OneFootball

Lothar Matthäus has one of the most storied football careers of all time, part of which included a bizarre eight-month stretch with the New York/New Jersey MetroStars in Major League Soccer. We revisit his Stateside stint, complete with feuds and a controversial midseason vacation to St. Tropez.

Have you ever done something stupid for love? Of course you have. Haven’t we all?

Remember that as we take a quick detour with an MLS trivia question: Can you name the four Ballon d’Or winners to have ever played in MLS?

If you said Lionel Messi and Kaka, congratulations on getting the obvious answers right. Real MLS heads will also remember Hristo Stoichov, the Bulgaria and Barcelona legend who spent three seasons in MLS split between the Chicago Fire and DC United.

The fourth, while just as legendary as the aforementioned names, had a bit more complicated tenure in the league.

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For eight magical months in the year 2000, a German superstar the likes of which we haven’t seen since graced the nascent Major League Soccer with his presence (well, mostly): Lothar Matthäus.

Matthäus lived the dream of every young soccer-obsessed German boy. Born in 1961, he was the son of a Czech refugee and canteen owner, Heinz, and PUMA athletic shoe employee, Katharina. Matthäus grew up in Bavaria, playing in the youth system of FC Herzogenaurach before beginning his professional career at Borussia Monchengladbach, the former club of another ex-MetroStar in Michael Bradley.

From 1984 until the year 2000, Matthäus was a mainstay at Bayern Munich, albeit with a wildly successful four-year stint at Inter Milan thrown in from 1988-92. At club level, Matthäus managed six Bundesliga titles, two German Cups, another three German league cups, a Scudetto, two UEFA Cups, and a bevy of other trophies and medals that one can only achieve playing at an absurdly high level for a 20-year career.

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The only thing more impressive than Matthäus’s club accomplishments is what he managed at the international level. He played in three World Cup finals, losing the first two to Italy and Argentina, respectively, before captaining West Germany to the 1990 title in Italy, getting revenge over Diego Maradona’s Argentina in the final.

Maradona reportedly called Matthäus “The best rival I’ve ever had,” after Matthäus had been personally tasked with man-marking the Argentinean dynamo at the 1986 World Cup final. His manager at Bayern and Inter, Giovanni Trappatoni, famously quipped, “I admire Platini, I admire Maradona, but to win, I need Matthäus.”

Eliot J. Schechter /Allsport

Matthäus, having already accomplished just about everything in Europe, was now poised to light the world of North American soccer on fire. He finally made the leap to the New York/New Jersey MetroStars in March of 2000. Giants Stadium itself might have been seen as a bit of an omen for what was to come, however, as the newly-unified country of Germany had lost there to Stoichov’s Bulgaria in the World Cup quarterfinals in 1994. Matthäus, to his credit, did manage to score a penalty in that game.

The fairytale for which everyone hoped would not come to pass, however. Matthäus only lasted until October 2000 before retreating, tail between his legs, to Europe once more. He scored zero goals and tallied just three assists in 16 appearances. So what on earth went wrong?

The MetroStars team that Matthäus joined was coming off a bottom-of-the-conference performance in 1999. It did, however, boast some names that are instantly recognizable to MLS fans: Mike Petke, Tab Ramos, Clint Mathis, and Tim Howard.

Given that the MetroStars were dismal for much of their early history, it made sense for the club to go with a splashy new signing that would bring in fans and hopefully lift the team out of the basement of the Eastern Division, which was, at the time, only four teams.

General Manager Charlie Stillitano first attempted to sign Matthäus in the spring of 1999. Signing such a high-profile player to such a fledgling league would be no easy task, and Matthäus would command a sizable salary. Given that this occurred in the pre-Designated Player era of Major League Soccer, Stillitano decided that the only way to fit Matthäus under the salary cap was to ship out a handful of experienced players, including United States men’s national team legend Eric Wynalda, who never actually managed to play a game for the MetroStars before being flipped to the Miami Fusion.

The egg settled squarely on Stillitano’s face, however, as Matthäus pulled out of the potential move once it became clear that Bayern Munich were on the verge of another Champions League run. Thanks in large part to this epic fumble, Stillitano was fired from his role as GM following the 1999 season and replaced with former Tampa Bay Mutiny executive Nick Sakiewicz.

So why was Matthäus even entertaining a move to MLS in the first place? It certainly would have been easy for him to see out his career in Germany before transitioning into coaching. It was for love, of course. (Remember?)

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Enter Maren Muller-Wohlfahrt. Daughter of the doctor for Bayern Munich and the German national team, she swooned over Lothar, despite being 16 years his junior. It’s Europe, I guess.

Muller-Wohlfahrt had aspirations of becoming a world-famous fashion model. In the old days, it stood to reason that young women would move to Paris or Milan to pursue this line of work, but not any longer. Owing to the success of German models such as Heidi Klum and Claudia Schiffer, it seemed like the surest path to success for tall, blonde Germans was a move across the pond to the Big Apple, and Matthäus was only too happy to accommodate her.

He forced a move to the MetroStars, the team that German newspaper Bild referred to as “The worst team in the world.”

You see, Matthäus had a reputation for being something of a romantic. As of the writing of this article, he’s been married and subsequently divorced a whopping five times, most recently to Ukrainian model Anastasia Klimko. The fact that he has been so consistently eager to tie the knot, in spite of all previous evidence that maybe marriage just isn’t for him, proves something substantive about Matthäus. It proves that he loves love.

It also proves that there’s a non-zero chance that he forced a move to a team that neither he nor anyone else in his orbit knew anything about to accommodate the dreams of his much younger girlfriend.

He was introduced at the ESPN Zone in New York City. It’s easy to forget that, in spite of his relative anonymity on this side of the pond, Matthäus remained a massively famous figure in his native Germany. Reportedly 46 German reporters accompanied him along to New York for his initial unveiling. Matthäus and Muller-Wohlfahrt were reportedly put up in a $10,000-a-month penthouse in Trump Tower, along with private car service to the MetroStars’ training facility.

Ronald Martinez /Allsport

The rest of the MetroStars players and staff were understandably thrilled at the prospect of such an accomplished player joining their ranks. Ramos, who captained the side, gushed: “This is crazy, you know… I used to think I was big time. This is so good for soccer in general.”

There was even the suggestion that Matthäus pretended to have recognized Ramos from having played against him at the World Cup in 1998.

Matthäus made his MetroStars debut in the opening game of the season, a 3-1 loss to Wynalda’s Miami Fusion. In what would be a bit of a harbinger of the type of relationship Matthäus would have with Major League Soccer, he reportedly spent much of the match complaining about the refereeing, and insisting that the goal Wynalda scored ought to have been ruled out for a handball.

The MetroStars team that Matthäus played for certainly wasn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but the success the team enjoyed certainly seems to have come in spite of Matthäus’s presence rather than because of it. But Matthäus continued to show a nonchalant attitude when it came to his teammates and head coach Octavio Zambrano. Although the MetroStars would go on to win the Eastern Division that year, they boasted a better points-per-game ratio with Matthäus out of the lineup.

The clumsy pairing of Matthäus and MLS came to a head when, in the summer of his only season in North America, Matthäus suffered a back injury serious enough to sideline him for an extended period. The club granted Matthäus permission to seek treatment from his own personal doctors in Munich in the hope that it would speed his recovery.

One might imagine the club’s surprise when Matthäus, while ostensibly on a Bavarian treatment table, was photographed with Muller-Wohlfahrt sunning on the deck of a yacht in Saint Tropez. Perhaps Matthäus had forgotten his own level of tabloid fodder when it came to the European paparazzi, or such was his contempt for MLS that he simply didn’t care enough to hide his deceit, but the MetroStars front office went apoplectic at the situation.

Sakiewicz sounded off in the media, stating, “I’m not particularly impressed with the way he is playing and I’m not particularly impressed with the way he’s handling the injury.”

Matthäus fired back: “The club doesn’t need me and I don’t need them. It is a shame it has not worked out, but I can live without football.”

Lothar Matthäus with MetroStars head coach Octavio Zambrano. Lutz Bongarts/Bongarts/Getty Images

Then, assuming all bets were up, Matthäus took the opportunity to drag Zambrano’s name through the mud, saying, “Octavio Zambrano offended me way too much. He changes his mind way too often. The next time he changes his mind would be when I show up at practice. I couldn’t enjoy working together with him.”

The writing seemed to be on the wall, with the rest of the MetroStars roster purportedly fed up with Matthäus’s drama. When notified that Matthäus might be released, midfielder Petter Villegas told the Newark-Star Ledger: “Good. Now maybe we can get someone who can help us.”

The team then set up a meeting with Matthäus, Zambrano, and newly appointed Commissioner Don Garber as a last-ditch effort to convince him to play out the rest of his one-year contract. Matthäus reportedly told his side of the story, even trying to blame the little excursion on his girlfriend. All parties came to an understanding, and Matthäus halfheartedly played out the string before his MetroStars crashed in the semifinals to the Chicago Fire in a truly bizarre three-game series that allowed teams to accumulate points rather than having any of the games go to penalty kicks.

Matthäus then crawled back to Europe to begin his never-very-successful coaching career. He and Muller-Wohlfahrt broke up in 2002, and he took a job coaching Serbian club Partizan. That same year he got engaged to Serbian socialite Marijana Čolić, to whom he remarkably stayed married until 2009. He had some notable success with Partizan, knocking Newcastle out of the qualifying stages of the Champions League in 2003. Stints with the Hungarian and Bulgarian national teams with stop-overs at Atletico Paranaense, Red Bull Salzburg, and Maccabi Netanya rounded out Matthäus’s ignominious coaching career.

So what is to be gleaned from Matthäus’s ill-fated time in Major League Soccer? First, it’s abundantly clear that the league has been treated by some, since its early days, as a means to an end. For every Robbie Keane who makes the leap eager to score goals, there’s another Olivier Giroud who just wants to hang out with professional surfers.

Secondly, this league is not and has never been a walk in the park. This isn’t professional baseball, in which contracts are earned in the past and paid out in the future. Even the guys making $60,000 a year at the turn of the millennium refused to simply roll over at the sight of a Ballon d’Or winner and World Cup champion. Third, we can all learn a valuable life lesson: don’t move to a club you’ve never heard of before just because your girlfriend wants to be a model.